In a note to clients Thursday, RBC's Amit Daryanani used Strategy Analytics' market research to estimate what a $300 iPhone 5C might do to Apple's (AAPL) bottom line.

Even with the heavily discounted iPhone 4 in the mix, only 2% of Apple's unit sales so far have come from iPhones selling for less than $300. (Samsung, by contrast, gets 60% of its smartphone sales from devices that cost $300 or less.)

The graph itself is quite remarkable. Nokia has the highest percentage of sub-$300 phones (because of its feature phone business). The next-biggest is a surprise, though.

It's currently the world's longest and fastest stretch of maglev train, reaching speeds as high as 310 mph in a demonstration last week. But Japan's L-Zero only lives on 15 miles of test track, and we're still more than a decade away from completion.

After five years of trials, plus some starts and stops, Central Japan Railway Co. is finally starting construction on a maglev line between Nagoya and Tokyo, a 177-mile trip that will be cut from 95 minutes on today's high-speed trains to just 40 minutes with maglev by 2027. To put that kind of speed in perspective, Amtrak's Acela takes about 3 hours and 40 minutes to go about 210 miles. A trip from Boston to New York on maglev would take under an hour.

In all iOS versions until now, a user's app could only call the app developer's server (that is, get updated with new data) when that user actually pressed to open her app. Apple allowed for push notifications as a separate channel.

So, for example, your Facebook icon displays a little red number badge when you have new Facebook notifications, but you have to actually open up the app and wait awhile for it to call Facebook's server before the app itself knows what those red numbers referred to and what those notifications are. That wait — those ubiquitous spinning wheels — at times seems interminable.

Background fetching in iOS7 lets an app wake up before you use it — just enough to present the data you'll want at the moment you open it. It's like one of those coffee makers that automatically brews your morning joe so it's fresh and hot just when you come down to the kitchen.

Whether you like the new Onion or not, something has clearly changed at the paper. What happened to the Onion? Two words: the Internet. About a year ago, the Onion went through one of the most profound transitions in its history—a change you could see as ruinous or necessary, either the best or the worst thing that's ever happened to fake news.

As a cost-cutting measure, the paper's corporate overlords—which, according to several former staffers, is very much the way editorial team has always thought of the business team—decided to move the comedians from New York to Chicago, where the business side operated.

HTC is sailing towards the autumn back-to-school sales season with broken masts and a big hole under the waterline. To make things worse, the company is going to launch a pricey phablet as its next model. This is precisely the wrong move to make now that we know that the brand has zero high-end appeal.

The second devastating setback for HTC is the Microsoft acquisition of Nokia. The buzz in Helsinki this week is that Microsoft is going to implement major price cuts of Lumia models as it prepares to fight for market share in Asia and Europe. Microsoft must cut prices on Lumia models ruthlessly because it will lose the Windows platform support of Samsung and HTC now that it is competing directly against them.

Today we're unveiling a new kind of Chrome App, which brings together the speed, security and flexibility of the modern web with the powerful functionality previously only available with software installed on your devices. (Think apps designed for your desktop or laptop, just like the ones for your phone and tablet.) These apps are more powerful than before, and can help you get work done, play games in full-screen and create cool content all from the web. If you're using Windows or a Chromebook, you can check them out in the "For your desktop" collection in the Chrome Web Store (Mac & Linux coming soon).

Here's what you can expect with new Chrome Apps:• Work offline: Keep working or playing, even when you don't have an internet connection.• More app, less Chrome: No tabs, buttons or text boxes mean you can get into the app without being distracted by the rest of the web.• Connect to the cloud: Access and save the documents, photos and videos on your hard drive as well as on Google Drive and other web services.

What is the point of this, other than giving Google more things either to support or abandon? The world isn't short of photo editors or to-do lists - two of the apps it touts here.

Few days ago, I got an email alert at slightly odd hours saying: "Contact FedEx for delivery of your courier." If it were an email, I would have immediately dismissed the message as spam but in this case, the reminder came through Google calendar.

It's not a particularly new spam, but it's mighty annoying if you have your email set to "add invitations to my calendar". Worse is figuring out how not to reply to it, either declining or accepting it. (The linked Google help page is no use - it's 404.)

Seoul, Korea, July 22, 2009 – Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, today announced the launch of the S9110, a cutting-edge watchphone featuring a full touch screen.

The sleek S9110 is a mere 11.98mm thick thanks to the company's advanced surface mounting technology, making it the slimmest watchphone device in the market. Featuring a 1.76" full touch screen customized for the wrist-watch form factor, the S9110 aims to attract mobile phone users who want a unique fashion item that keeps them connected on the go. The device also enables the users to check their e-mail seamlessly through Outlook.

Price: €450. If at first you don't succeed.. wait four years and add four screws to the front.